If you’ve driven Cobb Parkway through Marietta, Georgia, you’ve likely spotted it a 56-foot-tall steel rooster with rolling eyes and a moving beak, high atop a KFC. The much loved icon was built in 1963, originally part of a restaurant called Johnny Reb’s Chick, Chuck and Shake. Hubert Puckett, a 1957 graduate of the Georgia Tech School of Architecture, designed the chicken after a company salesman sold the idea of a giant chicken to owner S.R. “Tubby” Davis. Puckett was working for Dixie Steel, a subsidiary of Atlantic Steel, who then constructured the giant metal bird.
Turn left at the Big Chicken!
In 1966, Davis sold the restaurant to his brother, who later turned it into a KFC franchise. Despite initial resistance from Colonel Sanders himself, the Big Chicken stayed because it of its iconic status. It supposedly was also the busiest KFC in the world…